LinuxFund and the Open Graphics Project are teaming up to raise funds and supply 10 Open Graphics Development boards to open source developers. After several years in development the Open Graphics project is offering pre-orders of development boards. The Open Graphics Project aims to design an open source hardware/open architecture and standard for graphics cards, primarily targeting free software/open source operating systems. LinuxFund is accepting donations on their website to help fund the project. Additionally you can pre-order an OGD1 board for yourself through Traversal Technology.

A "top of the line" Nvidia card with no device driver (e.g. using VBE and doing everything in software) would probably be a lot slower than one of these with full support for hardware acceleration. I think you're under-estimating the value of open documentation, especially for every OS that isn't Windows.

-Brendan

While this is true if you can get a system that comes with an onboard Intel video card that has better performance, for a lower price, and has open source drivers then what niche will this card fill? AMD/ATI has also been opening up documentation and providing code.

I applaud the effort but the graphics stack and documentation has come a long way since this project was conceived and its relevance is in question if it cannot offer something above and beyond what is available now. It has to beat existing manufacturers in price, performance, or openness. From the beginning they were gunning for openness but this has changed a great deal in the past couple of years and I doubt they have the resources to offer better performance or a better price.